The Amazing life of Mother Teresa

Recently, I got a chance to visit the Maasai  MaraNational Reserve with a team of colleagues. The visit left me excited; not just because of the beautiful spectacle of Wildbeasts migrating from The Mara to Serengeti via the Mara River, or the wonderfull array of Flora and Fauna available, but because of an insight that came into my mind . As our game drive progressed on, I saw beautiful animals that were equally amazed at seeing me and a question popped into my mind, what’s the purpose of living for these wild animals, what do they think about most of the time, do they have a mission and a vision in life. I could certainly realize that these animals always think about one thing, or two - what they will eat. Others also go about this business by being cautious not to become food to some others. Imagine how boring life would be just to wake up to eat, drink, sleep, 24 hours, 7 days a week and 365 days for the rest of your life. Yet we as human beings are spared this great tragedy by our maker, because we can think, reason, plan, execute, make mistakes, learn from them and go on with life. But there is a certain group of people who tend to borrow heavily from the Maasai Jungle way of life, these people just go to school, graduate, get a job, get married, have kids, retire and wait to die. This kind of thinking, or living certainly puzzles me, there must be a better way to live, there must be a great purpose for our living.

Nobody exemplified the need to live a purposeful life better than one Mother Teresa Who was Born Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu  on August 26^th 1910,in Albania. By age 12 she was convinced that she should commit herself to a religious life. She left home at age 18 to join the Sisters of Loreto as a missionary. On 10 September 1946, Teresa experienced what she later described as "the call within the call" while traveling by train to the Loreto convent in Darjeeling from Calcutta for her annual retreat. "I was to leave the convent and help the poor while living among them. It was an order. To fail would have been to break the faith."She began her missionary work with the poor in 1948, replacing her traditional Loreto habit with a simple white cotton sari decorated with a blue border. Mother Teresa adopted Indian citizenship, spent a few months in Patna to receive a basic medical training in the Holy Family Hospital and then ventured out into the slums. Initially she started a school in Motijhil (Calcutta); soon she started tending to the needs of the destitute and starving. In 1982, at the height of the Siege of Beirut, Mother Teresa rescued 37 children trapped in a front line hospital by brokering a temporary cease-fire between the Israeli army and Palestinian guerrillas. Accompanied by Red Cross workers, she traveled through the war zone to the devastated hospital to evacuate the young patients. When Eastern Europe experienced increased openness in the late 1980s, she expanded her efforts to Communist countries that had previously rejected the Missionaries of Charity, embarking on dozens of projects. She was undeterred by criticism about her firm stand against abortion and divorce stating, "No matter who says what, you should accept it with a smile and do your own work." She visited the Soviet republic of Armenia following the 1988 Spitak earthquake, and met with Nikolai Ryzhkov, the Chairman of the Council of Ministers.Mother Teresa traveled to assist and minister to the hungry in Ethiopia, radiation victims at Chernobyl, and earthquake victims in Armenia.By 1996, she was operating 517 missions in more than 100 countries. Over the years, Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity grew from twelve to thousands serving the "poorest of the poor" in 450 centers around the world. The first Missionaries of Charity home in the United States was established in the South Bronx, New York; by 1984 the order operated 19 establishments throughout the country. President Ronald Reagan presented Mother Teresa with the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a White House ceremony, 1985

In 1979, Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, "for work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress, which also constitutes a threat to peace." She refused the conventional ceremonial banquet given to laureates, and asked that the $192,000 funds be given to the poor in India stating that earthly rewards were important only if they helped her help the world's needy. When Mother Teresa received the prize, she was asked, "What can we do to promote world peace?" She answered "Go home and love your family." Building on this theme in her Nobel Lecture, she said: "Around the world, not only in the poor countries, but I found the poverty of the West so much more difficult to remove. When I pick up a person from the street, hungry, I give him a plate of rice, a piece of bread, I have satisfied. I have removed that hunger. But a person that is shut out, that feels unwanted, unloved, terrified, the person that has been thrown out from society—that poverty is so hurtable [sic] and so much, and I find that very difficult." She also singled out abortion as 'the greatest destroyer of peace in the world'.

Mother Teresa died on  5^th September 1997 aged 87. Her death was mourned in both secular and religious communities, in both Christian and other religious circles all over the world. Her life-long devotion to the care of the poor, the sick, and the disadvantaged was one of the highest examples of service to our humanity." Following her death she was beatified by Pope John Paul II and given the title Blessed Teresa of Calcutta. She has been memorialized through museums, been named patroness of various churches, and had various structures, Universities, Children  and roads named after her, including Albania's international airport and probably my yet to be born daughter.

Back to where I began, what’s your purpose in life, how would you want to be remembered in this life, how can you leave it  better than you found it?  What lesson can you draw from the selfless life of Mother Teresa? Les Brown says “ Oh God to reach the point of death only to realize that you have never lived, only to realize that you have never scrapped the surface of your potential” Are we going to have this bitter realization when it is too late to turn back ? , Let me leave you with this quote from Martin Luther King Jr and then rest my case ‘Be ashamed to die until you have won a victory for humanity’